Optimizing Your Digital Marketing Campaign

For most small businesses, digital marketing budgets are a finite resource. While larger brands have the luxury of outspending their marketing mistakes, small business owners must carefully allocate every dollar in order to maximize profits. To make the most of your marketing budget, here are a few strategies any business can use to improve their ROI.

Support Successful Strategies

Create goals in Google Analytics to effectively measure the quantity and source of sales or leads you receive. By comparing sources like social media channels, organic web traffic and pay-per-click advertising campaigns, you can apply the commonly used 80/20 rule, also referred to as the Pareto Principle.

A basic principle that requires businesses to identify what sources provide the majority of their sales so they can allocate their budget accordingly. Use the 80/20 principle to recognize the top 20 percent of your business sources that generate 80 percent of the quality results. Once you have identified this segment, begin allocating more of your marketing budget. For small businesses operating on miniscule budgets, a more streamlined 90/10 strategy may be warranted.

Stay On Top of Targeting and Budget

Not every marketing avenue allows businesses the ability to control which audience is targeted and how much money is spent. Rather than thinning out your budget marketing across a variety of platforms, focus on the avenues that allow you to control both cost and targeting. Most major online advertising platforms like Facebook, Bing and Google allow you to set up campaigns that specifically target a certain audience.

The better able you are to control who you advertise to and how much you spend the greater your ability to focus on what works and eliminate what doesn’t.

Don’t Expand Your Budget Until Profitable

Whether offline or online, every marketing campaign should begin with a narrow focus and moderate budget. Once a campaign proves itself profitable, you can then begin to ramp up your marketing efforts. This can mean your business starts to experiment with different types of campaigns on the same platform or begins experimenting on new platforms.

The reason to start small before you establish a solid ROI is simple. First, the profit earned from the initial campaign offers your business a safety net for future campaigns that may prove unsuccessful. Second, once you establish one successful campaign you’ll have a better idea of how to replicate that success going forward. You can base future marketing efforts on the model previously used, or simply pour more money into what’s already proved successful without any significant risk on failing to earn a return.

Just make sure you have the hard data to back up any decision on whether your initial campaign was indeed a success.

Market Across Channels

The message your business tries to communicate to its target audience needs to be the same across every platform. That even includes accounts that you don’t use for paid advertising, such as Instagram or, potentially, Twitter and Pinterest. Time will always be money in business. The time you spend spreading your message through any social media account costs your business money and should be viewed similarly to paid marketing avenues, such as pay-per-click and print.

Remarketing Across Channels

Remarketing allows your business to target visitors to your website who did not end their visit with a conversion on other platforms. For example, say you operate an online boutique and a potential customer visits your website to look at spring dresses, but leaves without making a purchase. A targeted remarketing campaign will allow you to market the same dresses they viewed on your website while they continue to surf the web.

Think of remarketing ads like hanging a note in the corner of a screen. The more a potential customer sees an item they did not purchase before, the more likely they are to revisit your site and complete the sale.

At Local Fresh, we understand what small to medium businesses need to focus on in order to improve their online marketing success. Our online marketing specialists know how to identify what areas a business needs to improve on and where to direct their assets in order to build up their online presence to achieve the kind of return on investment needed to grow. To find out how Local Fresh can help your business take the next step in optimizing your digital marketing campaign, click here.

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